Tonight I came home from going missionary clothes shopping with Baboo and I was exhausted. The Hubba was washing dishes and so I put away the clean ones. I finally dropped dead on the couch and Wiyah who was doing her homework started ranting like a lunatic about how she couldn't understand her math homework and she'd been working on one problem for a whole hour.
Honestly, I wanted to ignore her. She's about at the level I quit with math. When I was doing that math, it was beyond me. I tried to do the homework every night but it didn't make any sense. The only way I passed calculus was because my good friend Anna Phillips was in early morning seminary with me and we had calculus first period. So we were always there early and she always took the time to help me finish my homework before class.
But there was my daughter literally yelling for help. So I braved a peek at her math book and did not understand one blessed thing. Those problems didn't even look vaguely familiar. I sat back down and told her I was sorry but I just didn't know. But I remembered how I felt every single night with no one to help me when I was stuck. And she was so pathetically frustrated.
So I took her book and painfully looked thoroughly at the problem. I did not understand it. I read the instructions above which said to use a particular theorem. So I just went back in the book until I found the right example of how to do this problem. I didn't really get the big scheme of what was going on but I could look from step to step and compare that with whether or not Wiyah had done similar steps. About the fourth step in , I caught the problem. She had a number with a decimal while the book's example still had square roots and fractions. As soon I told her that was in the wrong form, she figured it out and got the right answer.
Wooooohooooooo!
Then she had trouble with the next problem, too. I didn't understand that one any better than the previous one but I remembered seeing something on a page when I was looking previously. So I repeated what I had seen. Which was something about when to use radians. I don't really know what I said, but apparently it was the right thing because then Wiyah started talking back to me like I had just made a lightbulb go on and she was trying the problem again.
I'd like to be able to say that she figured out the problem and then finished off the rest of her math homework. But the truth is that I had to leave her at that point and comfort Mack who was devastated and crying because he had had a sale outside in the freezing cold (with soaking wet shoes even) and no one had purchased a single one of his drawings! And I barely had time to comfort him before I had to leave with Pinkleberry because it's the 100th day of school tomorrow, don't you know? And she has to have 100 autographs for the 100th day of school and she was only at 75! So I took her around the neighborhood getting signatures (and ranting to other beleaguered moms of the public school system).
Anyway. It was pretty cool. And I feel pretty dang good about it.
I cannot believe that after you finally get your 100th book read, they ask you to collect a 100 signatures. And you barely bat an eye about it! All we had to do was send in 100 pieces of (raisins, skittles, cheerios, whatever). It's like they're purposely trying to get you where it hurts..but why?
ReplyDeleteOh there was plenty of eye-batting and eye-rolling going on last night as I was driving her around in the cold, dark to the neighbor's houses. I was so appreciative of the moms who were signing names of adult married children and in-laws to fill up the spaces and help me out. We also had to send in 100 pieces of food for the huge thing of trail mix. I did our shredded wheat cereal.
ReplyDelete100 signatures? Really? What is the learning objective there? That needs to be challenged.
ReplyDelete